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The tyranny of the supertweeter

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Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#221

Post by nemo44x »

pessimizer wrote: post #170
nemo44x wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except in America, where it took on a somewhat narrower, variant meaning that focuses on "social liberalism." Right and you'll find large populations of both Democrats and Republicans fall under the "Socially liberal, fiscally conservative" banner with Democrats generally skewing one way a bit and Republicans the other. But ultimately, both sides headed the same direction just at different speeds and priority. I th…

> New Deal Regime Weird that the mainstream gets to claim this when they advocate against anything resembling any of it any opportunity they get.

Not really though. We are so immersed in it and the country is so different today than before it that we don't even notice it. We went from a pure capitalist country (where government in large part existed to clear way for capitalist projects and ambitions) to a very managed one with the New Deal. Social safety nets, benefits and entitlements, fiscal and monetary policy, and government "programs"/departments numbering in the hundreds or thousands did not exist before the New Deal.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#222

Post by pclmulqdq »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #73
ajross wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the true poison in my opinion. Journalists can in seconds find random tweets stating any conceivable narrative they want to create, and then launder their personal opinions by pretending to "report" on "what sources are saying". That... not remotely true. No one writes stories for major organizations based only on tweets[1]. Go pick up (figuratively) a newspaper and read the front page stories carefully, an…

What would you consider a major organization? I'll happily grant that the New York Times won't let you do that, but it's common for your Voxes ( https://www.vox.com/culture/23357114/the-little-mermaid-raci... ) or Rolling Stones ( https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/black-litt... ) to write articles on the topic of "I found some people saying mean things on social media".

I'm pretty sure many of those major publications ran a story or two about the "Ghost of Kiev" which was later shown to be a piece of Ukranian disinformation that was disseminated through Twitter.

On a more serious note, Twitter has been a very valuable source of info about the Ukraine War in general, which also makes it ripe for psyops from the Russian and Ukrainian governments. Several people on Twitter are very reliable sources, much moreso than the official state sources, and they get the news out faster. It makes sense for those sources to be used by journalists.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#223

Post by greggman3 »

SamBam wrote: post #79
Bakary wrote: post #7

The part about journalism is particularly troubling because Twitter is like crack for journalists and has thus played a big part in decreasing the credibility of the profession. The platform is a journalist's fantasy brought to life. The ability to exist as an individual and have an audience independently of their publication. Blue check-marks. As the article mentions, the capacity to find stories with little effort.…

There's also an excellent Exra Klein podcast where he talks to game-philospher C. Thi Nguyen about Twitter's Like button's effect on journalists. [1] He says that as a journalist on twitter (which almost every journalist is) it's nearly impossible to get away from measuring your worth/impact by the number of likes you get. It's so buit into our minds, we can't not use Likes as a proxy for how engaging our story is. T…

I've argued that Likes are evil and should be banned. I've tried in some places to remove them from my life. Via ublock-origin I have them blocked from HN beacuse I feel the rush of elation everytime I see I've posted somethign that gets even a few up votes and I can feel it addicting me to wanting to seek out more of that.

I've done the same on stackoverflow when I used to post their a lot. I hid other people's scores as well as the answer scores.

I'd go so far as to say I believe it's possible the like button is large percentage of the cause of all the various problems with social media. Likes on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc... I feel like remove the like button would go along way of removing the addiction and the attention seeking behavior of all the various social medias

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#224

Post by dexwiz »

Tycho wrote: post #118

I remember @pmarca kept a Twitter list of journalist accounts. It was a pretty good thing to browse, full of stories that journalists were trying to bring to light. Then in 2016 it became unreadable, just a 24/7 TDS group therapy forum.

TDS?

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#225

Post by pclmulqdq »

ProAm wrote: post #152
snarf21 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that this is true but don't just blame Twitter. Look at the major "news" networks. Look at the poor quality of "reporting". The bigger cause is the engagement above all else mentality of generating advertising. Click-bait, faux outrage, sensationalism, half-truths, posting 5 year old images out of context as "just in", creating scary fake crises, etc.

I agree but how do you suggest they make money?

The Bloomberg/Reuters model seems to work well: charge hedge funds $xx thousand per person per year for super-fast up-to-date news, and use that to fund reporting for a $10-50/month subscription service that also has a limited free tier (a few articles/month with ads).

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#226

Post by gruez »

anigbrowl wrote: post #210
gruez wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic that you're accusing the parent poster of "Disingenuous BS", when you yourself are engaging in moving the goalposts. The parent post was complaining about how a tweet was unfairly describing a political rally as a "nazi salute", but you're changing the topic to "political rallies doubling up as evangelical revivals" and "psychological manipulation". It's fair to be against this political rally for those r…

Right, it just looks like a Nazi salute and it serves the same psychological purpose, but as long as we call it something else it's perfectly OK. I think it would be wiser to ask yourself why this is being deployed at political rallies, rather than complaining about how it is 'unfair' to draw comparisons just because you can identify superficial differences. It's so odd how every time there's an instance of a group o…

>Right, it just looks like a Nazi salute

In the sense of what? Raising your right hand? That's basically the only part that overlaps. From wikipedia:

>The salute is performed by extending the right arm from the shoulder into the air with a straightened hand. Usually, the person offering the salute would say "Heil Hitler!" (lit. 'Hail Hitler!', IPA: [ˌhaɪl ˈhɪtlɐ] (listen)),[3] "Heil, mein Führer!" ('Hail, my leader!'), or "Sieg Heil!" ('Hail victory!').

Also, in the video a prayer was performed and afterwards they slammed their hand while saying "as one", both of which are not part of the nazi salute.

>it serves the same psychological purpose

Can you expand on this? What do you mean by "psychological purpose"? Is it just something mundane as "symbol of support in a political rally"?

>but as long as we call it something else it's perfectly OK

I'm certainly not defending the actions that were taken by the participants of the rally, and I suspect neither is the other poster (thepasswordis). The complaint is that the twitter poster decided to sensationalize that rally by calling something it's not. The problem with this is that words have meaning, and if you start using in cases that clearly does not fit the original meaning, then it gets watered down. eg. "nazi" nowadays is synonymous with "white supremacist" (which itself has also been watered down), which is far from the original meaning of "member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party". That's all well and good if you want to demonize those groups, but what do you call people who actually want to systematically murder jews?

>It's so odd how every time there's an instance of a group of people throwing up what looks just like a nazi salute, some people rush in to explain why it's bad to take note of the similarity.

I'm not against taking note of the similarity. I'm against calling it a "nazi salute" with no qualifiers.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#227

Post by jonnycomputer »

I've said this before, and I've said this a lot. If you want discourse to be more representative of what people generally think instead of reinforcing and normalizing the most ideological and extreme opinions, platforms should curtail or rate limit user's public posts/comments.

If you casually scan a typical news comment section, you might come under the impression that lots of people feel some particular way, when in fact, its just a couple of posters dominating the boards. The simplest way to make that problem go away is to have post limits of some kind.

Lots of ways you can do that. You can be granted points each day, which expire. You can increase the limits when particularly important things need to be discussed (Russia invades Ukraine! etc.). You can find ways to reward people with more speech, or limit trolls to less speech on your platform.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#228

Post by dylan604 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #220
dylan604 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read articles where I'm not convinced GPT-3 was not the author It also sounds like a Wikipedia editor's job

For many articles, the one dead giveaway that it was written by a human is the fact that almost all news articles have typos and severe grammar errors in the first hour or so of release. If these Twitter journos had better spelling and grammar, they would likely be indistinguishable from GPT-3 output.

so to improve GPT-3, have it make spelling/grammar mistakes too?

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#229

Post by greggman3 »

jqgatsby wrote: post #58
Bakary wrote: post #7

The part about journalism is particularly troubling because Twitter is like crack for journalists and has thus played a big part in decreasing the credibility of the profession. The platform is a journalist's fantasy brought to life. The ability to exist as an individual and have an audience independently of their publication. Blue check-marks. As the article mentions, the capacity to find stories with little effort.…

"It's the Mercator projection but for the opinions of people who don't touch grass." Well said! Also, the sample bias phenomenon being raised in the article comes up so often, and is so easy to be deeply fooled by. It's the same type of issue that makes people think that recidivism rates are much higher than they are: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/10/why-do-so-many-p...

I'm curious what you see as wrong there?

The original study said that 50-55% made it back into prison. The new study says it's more like 33% that make it back into prison. Yes, 1 of 3 is better than 1 of 2 but it's still 1 of 3. I'd call that high personally. In what other circumstance would I take a risk of something bad happening if the bad outcome happpened 1 out of 3 times?

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#230

Post by lowbloodsugar »

h2odragon wrote: post #119
PaulHoule wrote: post #94

My first take was that a "supertweeter" is the opposite of a "subwoofer".

I bet we could sell ultrasonic transducers to audiophiles at a fat profit. "Restoring the all important 48Khz to 500Khz band to your audio improves the listening experience, repels bats and mosquitoes, drives dogs mad, and will lengthen your lifespan by 100 years. Only $495"

Pish. $49,500 or it’s clearly a cheap knockoff.
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